Adaptive male lactation?

It has long been known that male mammals, including male humans, are physiologically capable of lactating. Screw with a man's physiology by giving him the right hormones, or the wrong series of starvation and then plenty, and he may start to produce milk. No one, as far as I know, has ever suggested that this is adaptive, that this capacity exists because men gain some reproductive advantage through lactation. Rather, it is usually seen as a result of the fact that we share almost all of our genetic material with females, who do make good use of their lactational prowess. Male lactation across the mammalian world is largely thought to be a side effect of intersexual correlation, the tendency for the two sexes of a species to have similar traits.

I am therefore skeptically excited to read that males of two species of fruit bats, one in Malaysia, and one in Papua New Guinea, are said to have "well-developed lacteriforus ducts and underlying mammary tissue similar to that found in lactating females" and that milk has been "expressed" from a large number of male bats.

It is not actually known whether these males are feeding young, and if so how commonly and to what effect, but this is the closest suggestion I have yet seen of the possibility of adaptive male lactation.

Sigh

I've spent the afternoon helping two of my best assistants move on to research that more closely matches their interests than what they have been doing with me. I'll still be helping to advise them, but I'll no longer have them on my project. They will be hard to replace, but after all the work they have done for me, I owed it to them to help advance their careers.
NN will be studying rotifer biomechanics in another lab (with me acting as rotifer expert), and MR will (if all goes as planned) be doing coral censuses in PNG (with me helping to urgently prepare her for her trip). My other long-term lab assistant, LZ, who is totally irreplaceable, is graduating in a week and moving to India two weeks after that to work in public health. Time to recruit more assistants.

Conservation inaction

A friend who runs a conservation organization in Papua New Guinea is visiting. She and I have been discussing whether, in the long run, there would be any meaningful change in long-term conservation outcomes if every western conservation organization in PNG were to up and leave. We are not convinced that there would be.

Sad.